New staff members have helped towards major cuts in cardiac clinic waiting times at Bronglais Hospital, with health chiefs saying they are hopeful of even further improvements.

With two new consultants appointed over the last two years, there has been a dramatic drop in the waiting time for cardiac clinics at the hospital, with three full-time consultants now based at Bronglais, and the hospital has become the first in the Hywel Dda area to provide CT scans of coronary arteries.

Locum consultant Dr Lenka Raisova was appointed in 2017, with Dr Kevin Joseph joining the hospital in late 2018. Consultant cardiologist Dr Donogh McKeogh said their appointments had led to “very big steps forward” with services significantly improved.

Dr McKeogh said: “We’ve made some very big steps in 2018 and 2019, and I feel we are now on the cusp of having a high level of local service, which has always been our ambition.

“One of our consultants, Dr Joseph, performs four or five studies every week, which saves a lot of patients the burden of a trip to Swansea, while Dr Raisova now provides a weekly transoesophageal echocardiogram list.

“This means that we have gone from struggling to accommodate these patients locally, with long waiting times, to effectively having no waiting list at all for that particular test.”

As well as the two new consultants, the hospital has also appointed its first cardiology nurse practitioner, Sister Gwenllian Parry, who will work alongside Dr Eiry Edmunds, travelling up from Carmarthen, to enable pacemakers to be implanted at Bronglais.

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